


there is a light (that never goes out)

by always_a_birthday_girl



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), I Don't Even Know, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rey being understandably fed up with this shit, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:40:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22018039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/always_a_birthday_girl/pseuds/always_a_birthday_girl
Summary: Look, it's not that she wants to wallow or anything. Rey's trying. She's doing Jedi stuff. She's teasing Finn and arguing with Poe and helping rebuild the universe.But she can't just forget that half her soul faded into oblivion, here. It's a fairly big thing to be missing.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 9
Kudos: 77





	1. Chapter 1

The voice that whispered in the back of her mind that she's better, stronger, destined for more: it's gone. And with it, the darkness that haunted her steps since she faced Kylo Ren on the Star-killer is gone, and the terrible sense of unbelonging is gone, and the trauma of suppressing her earliest memories is—well, not gone, but less impossible to bear. She talks to Finn, to Poe and BB-8 and Chewie; her friends, who don't always understand what she's trying to say but listen regardless.

She's less alone than she's ever been, but she still isn't sleeping at night.

Part of her died on the Death Star. She tells Finn this, and he thinks she's speaking in metaphors, but she means it literally. A piece of her soul, a piece she hadn't realized didn't belong to her, died with Ben.

Sometimes she still reaches out, searching for their connection, and it's there—there's just no one listening on the other end any longer. It would be better if she only lost a hand, an arm, a husband: these things aren't trifling losses, but they're wounds that heal in time. People learn to adapt.

She's trying. 

She's  _trying_ .

A few planets, the ones whose economies and governments haven't been completely annihilated by the First . . .  _Final_ . . . Order offer her land to build a Jedi temple on, but she refuses. Temples aren't really her thing. Tradition isn't really her thing. So it's up to her to construct an entire Jedi order, but, as she tells Poe, she has time. He doesn't have to act like she spends her days lying around, eating berries and braiding Chewie's hair.

"No, but you are kind of wallowing," he says, and she takes away his Falcon privileges for a cycle. She isn't wallowing. There's nothing to wallow over.

Finn's slightly more sympathetic, but he's also been strange lately, sometimes brooding or cranky for no apparent reason, going off on his own or with Rose, who—Rey guesses, from the sheer amount of time they spend together—is his new best friend. Or maybe they're fucking.

"They aren't fucking," Poe grates out, when she shares this observation with him. He sounds like he's chewing on plastoid. "Finn doesn't  _do_ that."

"You don't know that. He's never explicitly said that."

"He would tell me if he were banging someone, okay?"

She leaves Poe alone after that. He's not good for a proper conversation, anyway, and he's been crabby himself since he was rebuffed by that old girlfriend of his. He doesn't want to admit that he's, just a little bit, past his prime in the romance department, or at least past the years where his behavior can be dismissed as roguish charm and the need to sow wild oats.

Truthfully, she isn't doing much of anything, although it feels like she's always busy. She clears trees on one planet, and coaxes vegetation back to life on another; visiting Poe's home planet one week, she gets caught up in the mystery of a swamp that's been devouring children for the last decade. She answers questions about Jedi. She gets invited to many celebratory dinners.

And she's trying.

She smiles, she plays Jedi Master, she demonstrates her amber light saber. She weighs in on local councils and gets involved in more politics than she can handle; it's a messy business, this rebuilding of cultures, and she finds herself repeating the same advice across planets:  _find your core values. Structure your government around that._

She advises democracy, doesn't argue when some brave soul wants to take sole responsibility for their culture. She's no authority; she repeats this more often than anything else.  _You don't have to listen to me. I'm good in a fight, not the mess that comes after._

Trying. Trying.

One day, she tells herself, she won't just be trying. She'll be actually living again.

The  _make yourself useful_ is fairly obvious in Finn's tone when he asks her to take supplies to Devaron, a mid-sized planet near the edge of the Colonies, just a lightspeed-jump away from their current camp on the rock of Andara. It's a poorly crafted excuse to get her out of the Falcon, which she may or may not have been obsessively tinkering with over the last few weeks, but she pretends for Finn's sake that she believes it's every bit the pressing errand he touts it as.

He's a great leader. She reminds herself to tell him that . . . eventually.

She's descending into the planet's atmosphere when she feels it, for the first time in months. She slams her hand on the command console, almost fudging the landing just because she's overtaken with the incredible, overwhelming, impossible sense that she is  _not alone in the galaxy_ .

It's  _him._ She spins away from the command, expecting to see him behind her. Expecting their reality-bending connection to spring back to life. But the small bay behind her is empty, and the sixth sense fades like it was nothing more than a phantom limb. Maybe it was.

She lands with tears in her eyes.

There's coffee and rations waiting for her on the planet's surface, along with a Devarion colony with more distractions than she could shake an omnitool at. She's grateful. She's welcomed. She tells herself this, this is enough, and accepts their invitation to stay for a few days. Finn seems glad when she gives him the news. He tells her to keep out of trouble, but even through the holo-screen, she can tell he's smirking like he knows it's an impossible task.

Aside from a handful of outposts, once heavily populated and now abandoned by the defunct First Order, the surface of Devaron has no true cities: a few tents here, a wood hut there, no shortage of Devarions, yes, but never gathered in one place. Never rising in full force against the nature of their planet.

"It's part of our philosophy," one Devarion tells her, and she's about to ask what their philosophy is, exactly, when he adds, "The only exception is the Jedi temple."

"There's a temple?" She shouldn't be surprised—Jedi once had refuges all over the galaxy—and yet she is. The Jedi are dead. Why should reminders of their long-extinct civilization persist?

But yes, the Devarion tells her, there's a temple. He'd be happy to show her, or give her a map. He stresses that singular wandering is part of the Devarion culture, which she takes to mean he'd rather not show her the way. She doesn't mind. She might not have grown up in dense forests, or in this balefully humid climate, but she's come to enjoy it.

She sets off without thinking much about it, without arming herself beside her lightsaber or grabbing rations in case she gets lost, and it's not like her, really, except it kind of is. It's kind of exactly like her to leap first and think logically later, or never.

Anyway, the temple is only a few clicks from the clearing she landed in, and she reaches it without getting turned around. She half expects to feel the familiar swell of anger and greed at the sight of the temple—the pinnacle of Jedi power—but, of course, it doesn't. And while she's relieved to be rid of those irrational emotions, she resents the reminder that even her enemies have abandoned her to the world.

_Are we enemies, still?_

She turns, certain she heard that soft voice behind her, but there's nothing. Just trees and shadows, and she's foolish for thinking there'd be more. Onward: into another clearing, bordered by the now-expected statues of the Jedi who came before. Some are crippled, their bases slanted and sunk into the peat, while others have fallen completely, slain by toppled columns and thick, hanging vines.

The temple is an incidental structure, nothing compared to the size and magnificence of the courtyard. The mud under Rey's boots turns to shiny, colorful stones, still bright through the layers of moss and dirt. She can tell there was once a pattern, even if she can't detect it now. It spirals like the whirlpool under Ahch-To, but instead of plunging her into that darkness, it lifts her toward the sky—through the trees, to the light.

She . . . doesn't feel alone. And this time, the sensation stays with her, the slow rise of voices in the back of her mind real, almost audible enough to grasp. She closes her eyes, halting in her tracks ( _be with me, please . . ._ _**be with me** _ ) in the hopes that it will help her hear them better. 

It's been quiet for so long. She'd started to think the old masters abandoned her, or that she was beyond the point of hearing them. Beyond the point of  _ being _ , because she was devoting so much of her attention to  _ trying _ .

She knows she isn't the best Jedi. She holds her friends too close, her personal feelings above her duty as a knight. Her morals aren't uncompromising. Her will isn't indomitable. She likes to tell herself that she would never have taken Palpatine's hand when he offered it to her, but the truth is, she would have. For Finn, she would have. For Leia, Chewie, even Poe, the insufferable flyboy. And for Ben, more times over than she likes to think about.

If it were the only way to save them, she would bow. And it's only thanks to Kylo Ren that she didn't. So maybe there's still a small kernel of darkness that didn't die with the Emperor, a shard of the Dark Side that didn't belong to him—a piece that's still hers.

It wouldn't surprise her, then, if the old masters turned their backs on her. The war for the galaxy might be over, but the fight inside her will never be done. There will always be shadows and light warring for her power, and it's too delicate a balance to hold inside one person for long.

She opens her eyes and moves through the courtyard, unsure what she's looking for. Unsure if she's really looking for anything, or just roaming a place that used to mean something. She feels stronger here than she's been in weeks, more present than she's been in  _ months _ . 

"I've always liked it here," Master Luke says from behind her, and Rey's so lulled by the calm of the temple that she barely raises an eyebrow as she faces him. Of course the shade of her old master is dogging her steps. She wouldn't put it past him to hover until the day she dies. His craggy face is a mess of worry and sorrow, like always, but he sort of smiles when she turns to him.

"Here, specifically, or here as in at a temple?" She's past the point of being shocked, and knows better than to demand to know why he's decided to appear to her. He'll only say when he's ready.

"Here, on Devaron." Luke waves his hand around, and smiles again. It's a limp kind of smile, but she knows that, even now, it's the best he has to offer. "Although it was nicer in my time, and still nicer in the ages before that. It's been in ruins for a long, long time."

"There are countless places like that." Rey turns as she speaks, first looking up at the few remaining pillars, then around her at the collapsed Jedi statues. "What makes this one special?"

"You'll see," he says, which is actually less cryptic than she'd have expected. "You should spend some time here. It helped me, when I was first striking out on my own. It might well help you."

If anything can, she thinks, but when she looks back to Luke, he's gone.

"This is very frustrating," she calls, more to the trees and desecrated statues than anything else, "this being alone business."

If Master Luke hears, he doesn't respond.

The trees are easy enough to clear away, but righting the statues and cleaning the courtyard proves more difficult. She can lift the Jedi sculptures back to the way they were, but there's nothing to meld the cracked stone together. The mud hiding the stones of the courtyard is pervasive, spreading even as she tries to wave it away.

After roughly an hour, she takes a break. She's craving hot food, cold water, and her bunk on the Falcon, but all she has is a ration bar she finds squirreled away in one of her pockets—Finn's doing, no doubt, because he always complains she forgets to pack food. She saves the bar for later, because she's too stubborn to quit just yet.

_ 'Stubborn' is an understatement. _

She snaps her head around, beyond certain this time—it's him, it must be him, appearing to her the way Master Luke does, she way she knows he can if weren't just as nerf-awful stubborn as her—and thinks she sees a shimmer over one of the flat courtyard stones behind her. She blinks, and the shimmer is gone.

"Ben." She's self-conscious about saying his name out loud, always has been. She rises, searching the clearing, half looking and half wishing. "If you're hanging around, come out, you bastard."

He doesn't, and the certainty fades. Maybe she's just confused by the flow of the Force. She isn't used to sensing it this acutely now, not since he died. It must be throwing off her perception.

She takes it as a sign her break is over, and goes back to shooing the peat toward the perimeter of the courtyard. It's tedious work, but mindless, so she can devote her mental energy to figuring out how she'll get those statues to stand on their own again. It's a shame she can't heal the cracks in stone as easily as flesh.

Healing flesh makes her think of Ben, of his pulse throbbing painfully under her hand as his heart thrust blood out of his half-cauterized wound, and she steers her thoughts away quickly.

The next flash sideswipes her like a rogue starcraft, nothing but the briefest glance of his energy. Her control over the Force doesn't so much slip as tear out of her hands, blowing everything around her—mud, stones, statues, greenery—away in a two-klick radius. She cries out, horrified by the sight of trees torn up by their roots, shining tiles scattered through the underbrush, statues crushing plants and tree trunks and small animals she doesn't want to look too closely at.

Not again.

She presses her hand to her mouth, stumbling back through the soft underlayer of dirt, heels sinking in so deep she loses her balance and winds up on her ass. And maybe, she thinks, she should just stay here and think about what she's done for a while.

It's not right. She shouldn't still have this sort of influence over the Force, not with Ben gone. Not with Palpatine's blood scoured from her hands. Her breath is shallow, polluted by the dirt clouds her display raised, and it's making her light-headed. And she's so very tired of having to do all of this alone.

_ You aren't alone. _

It's just another trick of the Force; she squeezes her eyes shut rather than fall for it again. If Ben were going to come to her, he would have done it already. She can't afford this distraction, not if it's going to cost her mistakes like this.

"You'll always have me." He sounds so close. Her eyes prickle and burn, and she buries her head in the crook of her arm. It  _ isn't him _ . She just wants it to be him so badly she's imagining things. "Just as I'll always have you."

She takes a jagged breath, and wishes it away.

"Rey," he says, soft but annoyed. "Stop being difficult. You aren't a child."

She knows what will happen. She'll raise her head and there'll be no one there, just like before. The illusion that she isn't really alone is just that—an illusion. And then she'll be disappointed again, and annoyed with herself for hoping otherwise. But the voice is fairly insistent this time, so maybe it's better to just it over with rather than wait for it to vanish on its own.

She lifts her head and opens her eyes.

He's there.

Crouched on the dirt in front of her, one hand hovering in the air between them like he went to touch her and thought better of it, slightly transparent but defined at the edges, it's Ben. It's Ben. It's  _ Ben _ .

She makes a noise between a sob and a gasp, hands landing on either side of her for support. The ground is cool and solid under her palms, reaffirming reality. Her feet are braced on the ground like she's ready to run, but it's the opposite. She'll stay here for as long as she has to in order to keep him here. There's so much—

"You absolute bastard," she says, "what took you so long?"

"Well, I can go away again if that's what you want," he says, and the hint of pettiness in his tone reminds her so much of Han that she actually laughs, startling them both. She covers her mouth again, smothering the sound.

Then—

"Don't," she says. "Don't go away ever again."


	2. Chapter 2

He remembers overhearing Mom and Dad arguing about him. Mom was pushing for him to be sent to the temple, to Uncle Luke, and Dad wanted to take him out on the Falcon and teach him how to be a pilot. Even when he was eight, they were trying to determine his destiny for him.

Dad said, "He needs to be free, Leia. It's in his bones."

"You don't understand _what's_ in his bones!" Mom had been exasperated, loud, as she often was with Dad's complete lack of respect for the Force. Or maybe just for her opinion. "He doesn't need freedom, he needs . . . I don't know. That's the problem. I don't know what he needs, but it isn't here."

"Oh, Leia—"

"Don't _oh, Leia_ me. There's something missing in our son."

Mom won the argument, of course, and Ben went to train as a Jedi. But he's never forgotten how it felt to finally hear someone confirm aloud what he'd always suspected about himself: there was something wrong. He was _missing_ a vital piece of his identity.

And when he was young and confused, he'd thought it was the Dark Side. He'd thought the problem lay in him trying to be something he wasn't, and in a way he'd been right. But he'd also been terribly, terribly wrong.

Those deaths will always be on his conscience.

He spent so long _trying._ Trying to be the perfect padawan, Snoke's ideal right hand, the First Order's strong and vindictive leader. And all along, feeling acutely that he didn't belong: not on the Light Side, and not on the Dark.

Maybe he'd always been meant to turn his back on both. All he'd needed was a split-second of strength, and then it had fallen into place. He didn't need to try any more. He just had to live long enough to get to Rey, to help her take down Palpatine. Nothing else mattered after that.

Which, he supposes, was good, because he didn't have anything after that.

"That's a cute way of romanticizing your own death," Uncle Luke remarks.

Although he didn't think he'd have this much goddamned _company_ , and if he'd known his afterlife would be one big Force reunion with the entire Jedi order commenting on his choices, he might have thought twice about abandoning the Dark Side.

"I don't know what you're getting so uppity about," Obi Wan says, from Ben's other side. "At least he died in battle."

"I died in battle." Uncle Luke grimaces, all offended about being presented with facts.

Obi Wan picks at the sleeves of his robes and makes a _Well, technically_ sort of face. On the other side of him, Grandfather smirks and crosses his arms.

"I just want to point out to you all that I died _twice_ , and both times were epic—"

"Anakin, shut up," Uncle Luke and Obi Wan chorus.

"You're all acting like children," Mom sighs, and strokes Ben's hair. "It would have been nice if you could have avoided dying for a little while longer, dear. Not that we mind having you here, it feels like it's been ages since we had a real talk."

"Maybe because he was busy screwing everything up for the Dark Side?" Uncle Luke offers. "Just a thought."

And that's when Ben feels it—the tug in his gut, the echo of his connection to Rey. Before, it signaled an unavoidable confrontation, but now it's more like a request. She can no longer bull into his mind at any point, or—he supposes, though he never tried—vice versa.

He squeezes Mom's hand, and she reads it in his face before he says a word. "Again?"

Uncle Luke picks up on her tone. "You aren't going to visit Rey again, are you?"

"I don't have to answer to you. I'm an adult." He tries to copy Obi Wan's effortless authority, and doubtless fails because Uncle Luke doesn't accept the answer.

"You need to leave that girl alone." He points at Ben. "We don't interfere with the living. Our job is only to watch."

Obi Wan nods vehemently. "Unless there's some serious dumbassery going on."

"You made your choices," Mom chimes in, albeit gently. "You have to let her make hers."

The pull twists in the pit of Ben's stomach again, and he thinks, they probably don't understand. They've never seen anything like this before, they don't know how it feels to have a shard of his soul walking around separate from his body; how exhausting it's been to fight his own nature, to resist once he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that _she_ was the piece that was missing.

He didn't love her at first, or all at once, but once he did there was no going back. Even now. He shakes them all off and retreats through the Force—an experience that defies description—and back to Rey. She's still in the courtyard of the Devarion temple, and he wonders how much time has passed for her. He's learned it isn't always the same.

She looks tired. "Should've known you weren't good for your word."

"Since when have I lied to you?" He puts a hand over his heart, noticing her eyes flick across his chest with the movement. That's nice. But it doesn't change the fact she's swaying on her feet and apparently oblivious to it. "When did you last sleep?"

"Where did you go?"

"You shouldn't answer a question with a question. It's rude." He frowns, painfully aware that he'll be useless if she suddenly collapses. "Where's your ship?"

"Couple klicks that way." She gestures. "I'm staying in the nearest Devarion settlement. Why, are you tired?" Her gray eyes flash, bright and mischievous for a moment before she remembers what makes the joke a joke in the first place. Then her eyebrows tighten, and she looks away from him.

_No_ , he almost says. _Don't. Do that thing again . . . the smiling._

"You need to rest," he says instead. "Have you been waiting for me?"

"Like I have that kind of time." She waves her hand at the temple. "I cleaned the courtyard. At least tell me it looks nice." Her eyes brighten again, and this time her smile stays. "I just wish I could have gotten the stones back in place."

He looks down. There are piles of various colored stones lying around; flat, each one no bigger than his hand, brilliantly colored and impossible to organize. The shades are too nuanced, and there are far too many. But the rest of the courtyard does look nice, most of the debris from before gone.

He eyes the stones, then her, remembering the powerful blast that came right before they connected. The way power burst out of her when he was trying to contact her. "Perhaps you should try again," he suggests, gesturing to the stones.

"I don't know how they're supposed to go," she objects, because she's deathly allergic to agreeing to any of his ideas. Or anyone's ideas. Or anything, really. He's starting to think the true power of a Jedi is stubbornness. "Do you happen to remember?"

And sarcasm. Sarcasm is high on the skill set as well.

"Just do it." He almost tells her to trust him, but he's not an idiot.

A doubtful expression on her face, she raises her right hand toward the nearest pile of stones and scrunches up her nose. He can tell she's only humoring him, but after a moment, the first of the stones wiggles, and rises into the air.

He stands beside her and raises his hand, too. He can't say how he knows it will work, but when he reaches for the Force, it's ready for him—just as easy as it was when he was alive. Easier, even. One by one, the flat stones levitate, until they're floating around him and Rey like a swarm of unusual insects.

In unison, the two of them step back.

"How—" Rey starts.

"Can't you feel it?" _He_ can. It seems impossible that she can't. The stones begin to rearrange themselves in midair, catching the sunlight that sneaks through the leaves above them, throwing brights around like laser darts. Red flashes across Rey's face, and she looks at him, startled.

He gazes back at her in the midst of the show, one hand still raised in the general direction of the courtyard. Everything—him included—is so much stronger here. He's sure that's why he was finally able to connect with her here, after months of trying in other, more distant, locations. There's a convergence of energy; he doesn't know what will happen when she leaves the planet.

Lights flash across her face and bare arms, and reflect off him like he's another shiny surface, and not the memory of a man.

The first _click_ startles her; she jumps, mouth dropping open in surprise, and looks away from him to see more of the stones falling into place. "How—" she tries again, but stops, doubtless realizing he doesn't have an answer.

He knows only as much as she does, or maybe just a hair more. Just enough of an instinct to guess. "It's us."

_Click. Clunk. Click-click-click-click._ The stones fall faster, and her other hand reaches for him, and even though he knows what's going to happen—knows his hand will pass right through—he reaches back.

His solid flesh presses against hers in a burst of heat, and the last stone thunks down with a blinding, white flash.

Rey cries out.

And then she's gone.

Well . . . when he has time to collect himself, he realizes _he's_ gone; back into the Force, back among the stars and dead Jedi and absolutely nothing to do but sit around and suffer through several opinions he didn't ask for.

"That was stupid," Uncle Luke says.

"Unprecedented, it was," Yoda concedes, because of course he's here to pass judgment. He points two wrinkly fingers in Ben's direction. "A disquiet in the Force."

"Well, I'm sorry I broke the Force," he says, with maybe a little more attitude than necessary.

"It was interesting, at least." Grandfather folds his hands over his knees, sitting on thin air—or maybe it's a nebula. "Maybe you should try it again."

"Maybe you aren't the best person to be giving him advice at the moment." Uncle Luke rounds on his father. "Or ever."

"If no one ever took risks, where would the world be?" Grandfather shrugs. "Oh, right. Suffering through a dead Jedi order. Tradition is all well and good, but even Master Yoda agrees—it's time for something new."

" _Rey_ is something new! Ben is dead." Uncle Luke spares him an apologetic look before appealing to Yoda. "The line between the living and dead is clear."

Yoda shrugs. "In past times, it was. In these times, who knows?" He looks to Ben, which is uncomfortable. "A choice you must make, young one. Live in two worlds, you cannot."

"Helpfully cryptic, as always," Luke grumbles, sitting next to his father. "Well, if no one's going to listen to me, I guess I'll just—"

"Leave?" Grandfather suggests, his grin identical to Mom's. "We'll miss you. Please come by again . . . in another century or so."

Uncle Luke makes a rude gesture.

Yoda keeps looking at Ben.

"I . . . don't know what you mean," he says, and then Rey calls out for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> onward we go. I guess I'm sorta committed to writing a third chapter now, but after that, I got nothing. I've never really written this universe so it's all very new to me, and I'm leery of jumping in after years of just lurking in the Star Wars fandom. Thank you for reading so far despite all of that. :)

**Author's Note:**

> I genuinely don't know if this is the end. I mean, to some extent all stories could just go on forever, but in this specific sense, I'm not sure if I've written all I want to write on this idea. This is also my first (published) Star Wars fic, so I feel like one of those people only jumping on the bandwagon now that it's popular . . . look, het isn't my wheelhouse so I have no idea what I'm doing here. If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading!


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